Doubting Thomas

In 1840, the skull of Sir Thomas Browne was removed from the St. Peter Mancroft church, where it had reposed since 1682. “Who knows the fate of his bones,” its owner had once mused, “or how often he is to be buried,” thus making the theft especially ironic. For the next eighty-two years, the noted doctor and essayist had his cranium housed in the Museum of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital. In 1922, it was returned to lie with the rest of Browne’s earthly remains.

Today, Norwich, where Browne lived for much of his life, commemorates its most famous resident with a sculpture of his brain near the place of Browne’s internment. A pamphlet about the sculpture cheerily notes that Browne “was very ‘brainy’” and that “his house was approximately where the café Pret a Manger is now.” I like the idea of Browne’s brain presiding over an unremarkable commercial domain—Shoe Zone Limited, McDonald’s—because mundanities excited his curiosity as if he were a child. He would have spent hours in the nearby Body Shop, inquiring about the provenance of its salves, lecturing bored clerks on what marvels the ancient Romans had achieved with fennel.

Browne was born in 1605, the year that Francis Bacon published one of the seminal tracts of the Scientific Revolution, Cervantes published the first half of “Don Quixote,” and Shakespeare was writing his finest tragedies (“Hamlet” had come in 1603; “King Lear” would arrive in 1608). Browne reveled in his era, a strange time that was at once post-ancient and pre-modern. After taking his second degree from Oxford, in 1629, he went for medical training on the continent at Montpelier, Padua, and Leiden, all home to universities “reputed to encourage unusually free inquiry,” write Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff in their introduction to a new NYRB Classics edition of Browne’s work. Browne’s studies yielded no great medical or philosophical insight, but we read him for his questions, not his answers. His life and career were diligently unremarkable. He married in 1641, had children, and was knighted in 1671, though only because the mayor of Norwich didn’t want the honor and King Charles II, who was in town, had to give it to someone. Browne died on the cusp of seventy-seven. His tombstone identifies him as the author of “learned books.”

The most famous two of those books are coupled in this NYRB edition. The first, “Religio Medici” (roughly, “A Doctor’s Faith”), Browne’s attempt to reconcile religion and reason, was published in 1643, just as England was descending into a civil war conducted along Catholic-Protestant fault lines. The second, “Urne-Buriall,” published in 1658, has Browne musing, with strangely uplifting fatalism, on some Anglo-Saxon urns found in nearby Norfolk.

The writings themselves are as elusive as eels, and just as willing to plumb the depths. It is true that “Religio Medici” is a profession of Browne’s humdrum Anglicanism, but it also touches upon, among many other topics, the absence of horses in North America and the existence of witches. Nominally, “Urne-Buriall” is a study in anthropology—albeit one that discourses on the ethics of removing treasures from tombs and why the philosopher Diogenes may have “preferred a prone situation in the grave.”

Writing in an English far more heavily influenced by its Latin roots than its Germanic ones, Browne reads like he could have been one of the scribes behind the King James Bible, describing Creation, with fleet Elizabethan grace, as “that gentle heate that brooded on the waters.” At once classical and contemporary, and always restless, he simply introduced new words into the still-inchoate English language when none seemed to do the trick; Browne is responsible for “hallucination” and “suicide,” along with about a hundred other neologisms.

But let us not rhapsodize. Browne can be boring and difficult. His works are dense forests of allusion through which you hack, sentence by tangled sentence. Unless you use words like “eleemosynary” in casual conversation, a dictionary might help.

Your reward is bright meadows of insight. There he is, in “Urne-Buriall,” going on about how the ancients’ ”Funerall Suppers consisted of Egges, Beans, Smallage, and Lettuce,” when suddenly out he comes, blazing, with “the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.” Or in the “Religio Medici,” where Browne’s tedious justification of his own Christianity is leavened with pronouncements like “I fear God, yet am not afraid of him” and (my favorite) “our ends are as obscure as our beginnings.” The journey through Browne is made easier by editions that take advantage of the aphoristic quality of his work, extracting the sweet stuff while leaving behind the thick tedium in between. That was how I discovered Browne, in a British edition by Routledge that I found on the remainder shelf of a lower-Manhattan bookstore that has since closed. That collection, edited by the Cambridge scholar Claire Preston, remains my favorite because it is thematically organized, includes rigorous footnotes, and contains selections from his lesser-known works.

Then again, there is something pleasing in simply losing yourself in Browne’s prose, as you are forced to in the NYRB Classics edition, which has the full text of the two major works, with a fine introduction but minimal annotation. Browne’s own mind wandered, and it’s fitting to wander through it ourselves, to venture boldly into its heaths and valleys. “I love to satisfy my selfe in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an o altitudo,” he wrote in “Religio Medici,” adding, “where I cannot satisfie my reason, I love to humour my fancy.”

That ultimate reliance on the imagination is what has earned Browne admirers like Herman Melville, Jorge Luis Borges, and W. G. Sebald, all writers that shared his sense of endless wonder. Virginia Woolf wrote of him: “We are in the presence of sublime imagination; now rambling through one of the finest lumber rooms in the world—a chamber stuffed from floor to ceiling with ivory, old iron, broken pots, urns, unicorns’ horns, and magic glasses full of emerald lights and blue mystery.” That blue mystery began in Browne himself—“There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us,” he wrote in “Religio Medici”—and extended out to the natural world, a “universall and publik Manuscript” that he never tired of reading.

But unlike a true philosopher, Browne never coalesced his thoughts into a coherent world view. When he writes, in “Religio Medici,” that “persecution is a bad and indirect way to plant religion,” you are sure that you have found the first seeds of modern humanism. But then, just a few pages later, Browne dishearteningly announces, “I have ever beleeved, and doe now know, that there are witches,” and we are thrust back into the Middle Ages.

If there is any one lesson to be gleaned from his writing, it’s humility. Noting that the end of the world is surely near, Browne counsels in “Urne-Buriall” that “it is too late to be ambitious,” a statement of existential meekness made all the more astounding because it came during the Age of Reason, when the air was humid with ambition. And, after confidently expounding on the solidity of his faith and reach of his reason in “Religio Medici,” he announces that “the whole Creation is a mystery, and particularly that of man.” You can read this as despair; I read it as a curiosity that knows how to respect what it will never understand.

Take Browne’s strangest work, “Pseudodoxia Epidemica: Enquries Into Very Many Received Tenets and Commonly Presumed Truths.” Despite the implied hubris of setting all things straight, Browne primarily debunks the myths of pseudoscience to show his contemporaries how little they truly know. Chiding, for example, those who believe that Moses had horns, he cautions against “men vainly interposing their constructions.” He is incredulous that some think elephants can’t lie down or don’t have joints: “Herein methinks men much forget themselves, not well considering the absurdity of such assertions.” A lesser mind would have made this into dull stuff indeed; Browne turns it into a premodern Tumblr, an excuse to talk about interesting stuff. Have you heard what they are saying about pelicans?

The pervasive uncertainty of Browne’s writing offers a respite from the stifling certainties of today. We have religious zealots, just as the seventeenth century did—but we also have zealots of so many more varieties. We have had the end of history and the death of faith. Civilizations clashed, everything is post-something. Cassandras say we are digital drones; Panglosses say the Internet is freedom. We believe in St. Paul Krugman or St. Paul Gigot. Anyone who says we are a society lacking belief is not paying attention. If anything, we are lacking doubt.

Browne, who counselled with intimations of Ecclesiastes that “it is a vanity to waste our dayes in the blinde pursuit of knowledge” is an antidote to all this—to doomsayers and optimists and all those who prey on the human need to understand. He knew very little. We should all be so wise.